THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE WEST; An Evolving Identity Helps to Leave Five States in Search of a President

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: October 30, 2004

As the sun sets over the land on Election Day, the American West could become the landscape of victory for the man who will be president in the next four years.

For all the attention that the parties are paying to Sioux City, Iowa, or Dayton, Ohio, the election may well be decided in places like Lake Havasu City, Ariz., where the London Bridge was transplanted to the sands of the Mojave Desert, or here at Acoma, an Indian pueblo that claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the nation.

Heavily urban despite its open spaces, and soon to be more Hispanic, the West is also an unpredictable region in search of a new political identity. The war, terror, climbing health insurance premiums all matter here as elsewhere, but people are more likely to be independents.

As the electoral map dried up in the South for Democrats, they turned to the long-forgotten interior West. But both campaigns have discovered that political brand loyalty is a hard thing to find here.

''I'm a Democrat who voted for George Bush last time, and I'm voting John Kerry this time just because things don't feel right and maybe change is the only way out,'' said Amanda Mordem, a nurse's assistant in Bullhead City, Ariz., a sprawling town at the edge of a county that takes in part of the Grand Canyon and Indian reservations.

Five states -- Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, with a total of 36 electoral votes -- are still within reach of either candidate, according to most recent polls.

A tour through these five states this week, when millions of people were well into the thick of early voting, found a big land pulsing with the harsh intimacy of battle in the campaign's closing days.

''You can't keep it down this year -- people are just off the charts for this election,'' said Elizabeth Boyd, who works at the Face to Face Spa in Bend, Ore., where politics has elbowed aside talk of wonder exfoliants and earth-friendly facials.

Former President Bill Clinton plans to be in New Mexico Saturday and Sunday, pitching for its five electoral votes as President Bush's father did on Thursday.

''I've never seen the kind of churning we're seeing right now in the West,'' said Ron Judd, the Western region director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. ''There is this undercurrent like we had in 1994 when the Congress changed hands, like we're on the verge of something big.''

Oregon's Culture Clash

In Oregon, a state where doctors can prescribe drugs for the terminally ill to kill themselves but drivers cannot pump their own gas, people have been voting for more than a week in the all-mail-in ballot.

Oregon looked like a tossup for much of this year, with an island of Democrats in the Portland metropolitan area surrounded by Republican counties. Some Oregonians believe the state is trending more like Colorado did in the 1990's, full of Republican California exiles. But Democrats are still optimistic. Al Gore eked out a 7,000-vote victory in 2000, but he was hurt by Ralph Nader, who drew 5 percent of the vote. This year Mr. Nader is not on the ballot.

The red and the blue clash in Deschutes County, on the other side of the mountains from Portland. It grew by 54 percent in the 1990's, drawing people who live for cutthroat trout that rise in streams that dance through the high desert.

Clay and Julia Johnston, a pilot and his wife, formerly of Portland, were sipping coffee while filling out their mail-in ballot on a chilly morning. They predicted a victory for President Bush -- at least in this county where the two political cultures of the state collide.

''Wherever there is money, there are Republicans,'' said Mr. Johnston. ''And there is a lot of money here.''

Nevada's Wild Cards

South, in Nevada, money was on the air nonstop, and on the ground, as the campaigns bused people to mobile voting centers.

''Who wants to vote -- this way to the bus,'' said a Bush campaign operative on Tuesday outside the giant Victory Christian Center in a strip mall in Henderson, for much of the last decade the nation's fastest-growing city.

Nevada has only five electoral votes, but they have been fought over as if they were the last undeveloped real estate on the Las Vegas Strip.

A few blocks away, union supporters were getting their talking points and neighborhood maps for a day of ground-pounding. They were told to remind stay-at-home moms of the nuclear waste site planned at Yucca Mountain -- an issue Senator Kerry has been raising.

Paul Sanchez, one of many out-of-state union leaders doing political work in the desert, had a telephone number scrawled on the back of his hand. ''I go into the poor neighborhoods, knock on doors and just tell people to call this number -- someone will come get them and take them to the polls,'' said Mr. Sanchez.

Though Republicans are thought to have a slight edge in Nevada, the wild cards are state ballot measures, in particular a popular one that would raise the minimum wage.

Pocketbook issues are the big concern for Debra Pinkerton, an undecided voter who lives in Searchlight, a wind-raked town at the southern tip of Clark County.